How can IT leaders drive more innovation?

How can IT leaders drive more innovation?

This post was contributed by Don Schmidt, Global Managing Director, Oracle Cloud Engineering, Deloitte Consulting LLP.   

Leverage ELEVATE to make a fresh business case, transform custom code, and breathe new life into legacy systems

The pandemic has made almost everyone feel a little uneasy—and senior IT leaders are no exception. As they search for ways to make their organizations more flexible as well as more stable, many are finding that data lies at the heart of their efforts to innovate and to create a steady path forward.

As part of Oracle’s “Designed for Change” series, we’ll highlight Deloitte’s tech trends for 2021 and explore how IT leaders are leveraging new technologies to drive innovation.

Amid the shift to remote working and greater digitalization, senior IT leaders have an opportunity to look at data in a whole new way—not as something simply to be managed but as something that can transform business models and provide greater agility.  This innovation can take many forms, such as standing up data platforms to enable employee self-service; connecting field sensors directly to systems to enhance operations; and migrating on-premises databases to cloud-based alternatives to reimagine customer offerings.

The common denominator in such data-driven transformations is the cloud and its ability to revive the core. This year, as described in the Deloitte Tech Trends 2021 report, an exciting new trend has emerged where CIOs are increasingly exploring innovative ways to redefine the core-modernization business case. Over the next 18-24 months, we expect to see trend participants:

• Reengineer their business cases for reviving the core with new financial offerings and approaches.
• Pay down technical debt by refactoring critical code, removing unneeded functionality, and re-platforming non-ERP capabilities.
• Explore options for recreating legacy IT assets with a new generation of powerful low-code platforms.

ELEVATE, a strategic collaboration between Deloitte and Oracle, supports the “core revival” trend by empowering companies to transform their enterprises quickly, cost-effectively, and successfully—while driving business innovation on Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). ELEVATE is fueled by Oracle’s Soar methodology, which provides automated cloud migration, and Deloitte’s professional services organization supported by its ATADATA^TM cloud discovery and automation platform.

In addition to these tools, ELEVATE builds upon the combined industry, technology, and cloud experiences from each organization to provide customers with increased value and capabilities. It enables companies to reduce technology debt and provide scalability by transitioning workloads to OCI, which are operated and managed by Deloitte. Oracle Financing provides non-traditional funding arrangements, which lower financial hurdles. At the same time, companies can modernize their applications by consolidating finance, supply chain, or other functions on Oracle SaaS apps with embedded automation to decrease costs and enhance productivity.

Part of what makes ELEVATE so compelling is the business case re-engineering. Through non-traditional funding arrangements, the upfront costs can be smoothed out over several years, removing one of the most frequently cited barriers to core modernization. Another part of the value equation is the close working relationship between Oracle and Deloitte, which is unified by a single governance structure and clear lines of accountability. This allows the joint Oracle/Deloitte team to deploy combined tools and accelerators and resolve issues rapidly.

Oracle is one of the few vendors that can play end-to-end in the cloud market, ranging from technology (i.e., platform and infrastructure) to applications. The “Oracle-on-Oracle” play, or running Oracle applications, databases and middleware on OCI, makes sense for many customers. However, Oracle Cloud is also more compatible with rival technologies and open source solutions than many other cloud providers, meaning that customers always have flexibility of choice to operate in a hybrid environment.

By making a fresh business case, transforming custom code, and breathing new life into legacy systems, senior IT leaders are accelerating the pace of digital change. In support of their efforts, ELEVATE makes it easier to achieve a commonly desired end state: a foundation for digital transformation that allows an organization to continuously innovate by taking advantage of a high-performing cloud platform, migration automation, and emerging technologies for harnessing the power of data.

Learn more about how Oracle is helping today’s CIOs use data as the engine of business.